Formatting data for view

The application I am working on gets the data from the business tier as a list of value objects. Before forwarding the data to the view I need to format the data so that I can display it in the JSP without having to use scriplets. View helper is one of the strategy. But we are not using any custom data and want to do all the formatting of data in the servlet before passing on to JSP. Can anyone let me know what are the strategies for doing the formatting.

Genreally I do not do formatting in the servlet as that is part of presentation rather than control. To avoid scriplets on the page (a good idea, btw), I use either JSTL formatting tags as applicable, or my own custom tags.